Avi Networks
Avi Networks is a company that provides software for the delivery of enterprise applications in data centers and clouds. Acquired by VMware in 2019, Avi Networks provides application services including local and global load balancing, application acceleration, security, application visibility, performance monitoring, service discovery, and container networking services. The company is headquartered in Santa Clara, California and has R&D, support, engineering, and sales offices in Europe and Asia.
History
Avi Networks was founded in 2012[1] by Murali Basavaiah, Ranga Rajagopalan, Umesh Mahajan, and Guru Chahal and is headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Prior to Avi Networks, the founding team spent several years developing data center networking and storage solutions at Cisco Systems.
Avi Networks has raised $115 million[2] in four rounds of venture funding. The initial round of $12.2 million was led by Greylock and Light Speed ventures, the second round of $20.8 million was led by Menlo ventures in addition to Greylock and LightSpeed and the third round added DAG ventures to the investment team. The most recent round of $60 million added Cisco Systems. The current CEO is Amit Pandey, who has experience as CEO with successful startups such as TerraCotta and Zenprise.
In December 2018, Avi Networks announced the appointment of Mark Anderson as executive chairman.[3][4]
On June 13, 2019, VMware announced its intent to acquire Avi Networks,[5] which finalized on July 11, 2019.[6]
Technology
Avi Networks introduced a software-only[7] approach to application delivery and services with central management. The Avi Vantage Platform architecture separates the control or management plane from the data plane creating a distributed fabric[8] of application service delivery points that are centrally managed. These service delivery points called Avi Service Engines deliver elastic load balancing, application acceleration, and security services on a per-application basis. The Avi Service Engines also send real-time application telemetry to the central Avi Controller which continuously analyzes the information to deliver application performance, security, and end-user insights.
Avi software runs on bare metal servers, virtual machines, and containers in data centers, private, and public clouds.[9] The Avi Controller automates provisioning, configuration, and scaling of services through integration with VMware vCenter, OpenStack, SDN controllers, public clouds such as Amazon AWS and Google Cloud Platform, Red Hat OpenShift and Ansible,[10] and container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes, Docker, and Mesos.
References
- Gage, Deborah (2014-12-10). "Avi Networks Launches With $33M for Software to Balance Server Loads". WSJ. Retrieved 2017-04-16.
- Brown, Matt. "With Fresh Funding From Cisco, Avi Networks Looks Toward 'The Next Level'". Forbes. Retrieved 2019-07-30.
- Bureau, N. T. (2018-12-14). "Mark Anderson appointed executive chairman of Avi Networks". News Today | First with the news. Retrieved 2020-03-26.
- "Avi Networks Appoints Mark Anderson as Executive Chairman". MarketWatch. Retrieved 2020-03-26.
- Haranas, Mark (2019-06-13). "VMware Acquiring Avi Networks To Bring Public Cloud To Data Centers". CRN.
- "Avi Networks Now Part of VMware". Retrieved 2019-07-11.
- Kepes, Ben. "Avi Networks shows you don't need special hardware to load balance". Network World. Retrieved 2017-04-16.
- "Distributed Fabric: A New Architecture for Container-Based Applications - The New Stack". The New Stack. 2017-01-17. Retrieved 2017-04-16.
- "Avi Bridges the Enterprise Multi-Cloud - Enterprise Cloud News". Enterprise Cloud News. Retrieved 2017-04-16.
- "Red Hat Delivers Advanced Network Automation with Latest Version of Ansible". investors.redhat.com. Retrieved 2017-04-16.